Frank Moser and Paul Terry | Fanny Zilch, Episode 1—The Banker’s Daughter / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 2—The Oil Can Mystery / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 3—Fanny in the Lion’s Den / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 4—Hypnotic Eyes / 1933 || Fanny Zilch, Episode 5—Fanny’s Wedding Day / 1933

the pansy hero

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 1—The Banker’s       

     Daughter / 1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 2—The Oil Can 

     Mystery / 1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 3—Fanny in the 

     Lion’s Den / 1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 4—Hypnotic Eyes / 

     1933

Frank Moser and Paul Terry (screenwriters and directors) Fanny Zilch, Episode 5—Fanny’s Wedding       Day / 1933

 

In 1933 Frank Moser and Paul Terry began their Terrytoon cartoon series about the banker’s ceaselessly unfortunate daughter Fanny Zilch. Even before the first episode begins, we are told that Fanny has been married three times previously, the last time to “Oil Can Harry,” who is determined to keep hold of her and destroy any possible future love she may have with her current sweetheart, J. Leffingwell Strongheart.

     The published synopsis to that first episode, The Banker’s Daughter, describes the two of them, villain and hero: “Oil Can Harry: a deep-eyed villain but his colors run. So tough he uses spinach as a boutonniere. Relentlessly he pursues Fanny for her beauty, wealth and streamline effect. Strongheart: a hero with a steely glint in his eye and a blush on his cheeks. They done him wrong who called him pansy and thought he couldn’t shoot from the hip.”

     As we quickly discover, it is Strongheart’s horse, “a fiery charger once free from the milk route” and later his dog who not only let our hero know when his Fanny is in danger, but take him to where Oil Can Harry has hidden her away, and provide him sufficient help that he successfully foils the villain in each episode.

     Given the film’s own promotional description of Strongheart, he is arguably the first cinematic hero who is described as a pansy, a homosexual evidently gone straight—or almost straight.

      In The Banker’s Daughter the muscular beefcake does little except to ride in to Fanny’s father’s board meeting to announce is his high tenor musical voice—both Fanny and Strongheart sing their lines as in the popular musical operettas of the day—that he will save the Banker’s Fanny. Fanny has been kidnapped by bootleggers (although it’s really Oil Can Harry who has her) and has had nothing to eat for a week except fried chicken.

      As we discover already in this first episode Fanny does pretty well in saving herself. Despite being tied up to a chair, she manages to boot Harry out the window, for which he now determines to punish her by pushing her into the chute where logs make their watery way to the saw blades of the mill. Taking his plane back to the mill, Harry turns on the saw as we watch poor Fanny make her way gradually down to her certain severance with life.

 

     Recognizing that he cannot possibly reach the mill on time, the horse takes his rider up to the very top of a clearly penis-shaped plateau and kicks him off, Strongheart landing inside the mill to do battle with Harry and, after flamboyantly posing and bowing for our applause, pulling Fanny from the sawblade’s cut at the very last moment.

     It is the second episode in which Strongheart reveals his true gay inclinations. In The Oil Can Mystery Fanny has been snatched again by the evil Oil Can Harry, have tied her lover Strongheart to a railroad track in the middle of the desert. Will beer arrive soon enough so that he might survive?

     It is Strongheart’s beloved horse who saves the day by crying bitter tears which clench his master’s thirst. His horse then flags the train conductor just in time and pull’s his Strongheart from the track onto his own back, racing away with the hero, presumably to save Fanny from her new endangerment.

     Harry skates off to his hideaway (he often wears roller skates in these adventures), locking door after door behind him and swallowing the keys so that no one can follow his nefarious actions.

      Nonetheless, Strongheart suddenly appears demanding that the villain should “Cease or I’ll slap you on the wrist!” Harry turns to engage with his enemy as the two suddenly take up a tango, singing the lyrics: “I’d love to dance a tango / I’d love to dance with you dear / I’m yours forever just say the word. / …Oh, tell me do you love me?

   

     At the crescendo, however, Strongheart tosses his dancing partner out the window. He turns to discover the whereabouts of Fanny only to discover she’s hanging from a strange stirrup in a basement chamber where, she sings, it is cold, he turning to his audience, to sing in antiphon: “O, my Fanny’s cold.”

      Meanwhile, Oil Can Harry has sneaked back into the building, turning on the water valves in an attempt to drown his captive. We observe Strongheart drilling a series of circular holes that might easily be compared to “glory holes” in a public bathroom cubicle, as his trusty steed rushes off to the fire department to bring help before his friend Fanny drowns. Not to worry, Strongheart pushes the wall, breaking into a larger hole through which the water rushes out as he swims in to save his Fanny and together the two are swept out into a finale wherein they two proclaim their love, accompanied by the firemen, he lifting her high in his arms, and she lifting him even higher as the chorus declares “The End.”

 

     Nowhere again in this short series does Strongheart lapse quite so completely into his pansy past.

     In the 3rd of the series, Fanny in the Lion’s Den (released in July 1933), Harry captures Fanny once more, tossing her into his basement lion’s den, this time keeping her captive for several months. In the meantime, Fanny has utterly tamed the lions, taught them how to dance, and plays card games with the former “beasts” who now hate their keeper as much as she does.

     During this long period, Strongheart has apparently been resting on his porch, bottom up, his buttocks covered in a cross-patch that presumably indicates his “lost Fanny,” a sexual pun that also suggests that he has “lost his ass” or in gay parlance been sodomized, in plain words, fucked.

     His friendly pooch, however, has found Fanny’s footprints and followed them to Harry’s cabin door, immediately running back to tell his master who jumps on his friendly horse and races off to find his lover once more. He breaks in, briefly duels with the villain and tosses him to the crocodiles, hugging his Fanny to him as they sing, with the lions as a back-up chorus, of their love.

     In Hypnotic Eyes, the penultimate episode (August 1933), Fanny Zilch has once more gone missing—so the newspapers shout. This time Harry’s got Fanny locked away in a basement safe, who he lures out with hypnotism, obviously hoping to forego her hatred for him by altering her mind. Strongheart appears, knocks on the door, and demands his love’s release. But Harry shoots him, as our pansy hero falls seemingly dead. But his pet dog takes a plunger and, one by one, sucks out the bullets from Strongheart’s chest. His trusty horse slides under his body and off they go, the heroic trio, horse, dog, and heavily muscled lover to find where Harry has now taken his beloved Fanny.

       Harry has carried her on in his small airplane, and the pooch, realizing that they too must become airborne saws off the horse’s tail on which he has been riding which turns what’s left of the tail into a propeller which whirls up the horse and rider to the heavens where they encounter Harry’s flying machine. The down-to-earth dog finds an alarm attached to its own tail, which a passerby, who happens to be a look-alike Charles Chaplin calls in the Keystone cops. Even Al Jolson, Joe E. Brown and Jimmy Durante take an interest in these events.

     Strongheart’s flying Pegasus finally kicks off his heels, downing the airplane, as Fanny and her savior go flying off upon his friendly horse into the clouds.

     In the final episode, Fanny’s Wedding Day, the church is already full as the film begins. Fanny is dressed and ready for the grand march down the aisle, while Strongheart rides up to the church, stopping a few moments before he enters as his horse and he cry over their leave-taking, both shedding copious tears for the end of their sweet relationship.

     Harry has something special cooked up for the day, as he drops hundreds of skunks into the church, all the celebrants racing out, as he once again scoops up Fanny and skates away with her before stashing her in the sidecar of his motorbike.

     Strongheart, aghast at the events, rides off with on his trusty steed, but strangely stops off first to tell the head editor of Film Daily that he has once more lost his Fanny. “Again?” shouts the editor, who has no longer any patience given the number of times Fanny has gone missing, and throws our ex-hero out! Perhaps the news media had grown tired of the series.

     Of course, Strongheart eventually foils Oil Can Harry’s plot by tossing him off a cliff, he and Fanny singing out the series’ closing chords.

    Terrytoons were always perceived as being crude in both their visual and narrative representations. Even Paul Terry remarked, "Walt Disney is the Tiffany's of the business, and I am the Woolworth's." At moments, however, these cartoons showed remarkable style and creative cleverness. Today we see their influence particularly in certain cartoon-influenced artists such as some of those connected with Chicago School Imagists, particularly in the repetitions, so common in Paul Terry’s short animated works, of an artist such as Roger Brown. And this series demonstrates all the flaws and charms of that studio’s achievements. Although one can’t claim that the directors were being particularly sensitive to gay men in this work, the “former pansy” is still the hero of the series who manages, with a little help, to save the day again and again even if he has to tango his way into his heterosexual intents.

 

Los Angeles, December 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).